How A Hacker Turned Slack Into His Family's Control Room

Swedish developer Peter Fjallstrom recently published a blog post about some simple but innovative ways he’d been using Slack. Best known as an enterprise messaging tool that corporate teams use to communicate with one another (we use it at Forbes, too), Fjallstrom had migrated Slack outside the office and turned it into a dashboard for his family of four.

His post described the script he’d used to track where his 9 and 10-year-old kids were after school, by asking a Slack bot and getting a Google Maps image with a pin. His family also used it to discuss what to buy from their local grocery store, then pay for it all in the chat interface.

The post was shared widely and got more than 100 comments on Hacker News, where a few other users talked about how they used the tool to plan weddings or just communicate with family members on Slack channels.

“I never experienced anything like that before,” Fjallstrom says of the reaction. “It struck some kind of chord with people, that you could use the stuff you use everyday at work, at home as well.” (Read his post here, which also describes integrations with Google Calendar and the school's RSS feed.)

Project management tools targeted at companies are inevitably more developed than anything you can download for families on an app store, so why not hack the enterprise tools for use at home?

It's possible to do just that with Slack thanks to its easy-to-access API (application programming interface), which you can access simply by being a Slack user. Hence how Fjallstrom integrated the app with other web services like Apple’s Find My iPhone and MatHem, a popular e-commerce site for groceries in Sweden.

While Slack can cost companies $80 per employee per year, Fjallstrom is using the free version that still allows up to 10 integrations, and so far he’s only used half of those.

Like any good hacker, Fjallstrom had to write a few shortcuts that may have violated the odd terms of service, but as yet he hasn’t heard a peep from either Apple or MatHem.

To track his kids’ phones, he simply went on Github, searched for “Find my iPhone” and found a script which he he was able to configure into Slack. His kids know they’re being tracked and he concedes they might be less enthusiastic in the coming years - although when dad’s a hacker, you’ve got it tough. Fjallstrom wrote his own script from scratch for Mathem.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfiled (Photo by Carlo Ricci for Forbes)

This is all par for the course for Fjallstrom who makes a living out of tinkering with the backend of platforms and passing on a proof of concept to other companies. He was involved in one of the first Snapchat-based ad campaigns in Europe three years ago, when he figured out how a local mineral water company could add users on Snapchat and send them puzzle-piece images that added up on a screen to show an ad.

With Slack, he’s now looking at making a bot that runs quizzes for his kids based on school assignments, asking them a question when triggered and rewarding them with points. “That could be fun,” he says. “That is legal.”

Fjallstrom is also looking at ways to integrate smart locks, so that he could let a family member into the house by just replying to a Slack notification.

This is all testament to the open approach that Slack has taken to building out its platform, for example by launching an app directory in December 2015, that third-party developers can build for.

There are echoes here of the API-centric approach that Twitter took in its early days. In the beginning, Fjallstrom points out, Twitter “didn’t have an app. They just had an API. There were so many apps popping up using Twitter, that it became a hub for something.”

“That’s what Slack is trying to do as well,” he adds. “Trying to become a hub for planning your next web project, or planning your vacation.”